of the wanderers which secured them at first a warm popular welcome in the west, but the question of race and origin: are they a Danubic-Caspian people showing the usual Aryan and Mongolic admixture of the Steppes and fixed to-day as firmly as ever in their primitive homeland? or are they merely Hindu immigrants of a late date (c. cent. ix. a.d.) who swept up in their train any tramps they met? The almost complete absence of definite religious belief and practice is most striking and puzzling; they seem merely to have adopted the rites and faiths of the countries they traversed. We may now group together some of the chief facts ascertainable and some of the surmises which scholars have founded on them.
The Sigynnæ: their iron weapons and
horsemanship.
In the field of Cyprian archæology Myres had already (Liverp. Ann. of Arch. iii. 107, and Anthropological Essays, 1907) identified and dated a peculiar form of spear called sigynna by the Cypriots: the question has now been raised whether the Cilician king's title syennesis has any connexion? Indeed, the word leads us much further afield, even if it is on a doubtful errand. Myres identifies the SigynnǢ, a tribe in Herodotus, v. 9, dwelling beyond the Danube, with the Sequani, since their frontiers extended nearly to the Eneti or Veneti on the Adriatic. They seem to be connected with the iron-metallurgy of Hallstatt, which produced the narrow-bladed spear or javelin for hurling, which bore their name (cf. review of his Anthropological Essays in Classical Review, Nov. 1908). If we may trust Herodotus' text, the Ligurians living in the hinterland of Marseilles called traders by this name, sigynnæ, a word used by Cypriots in sense of spear. Further, the likeness of name has suggested that the gipsies (Zigeuner) are their descendants. In the older days of criticism and
